End of the 2nd school year

Celebrations and celebrities at the camp school

An intensive year has come to an end. On 10 June 2015, we celebrated the end of the second school year in the informal camp school for Syrian refugees we helped to establish two years ago. This year has seen many changes: thanks to the support of the Malaak Initiative, here in Lebanon, we could help to expand the informal school from three to fourteen class-rooms. More than 400 children from 18 informal camps in the surrounding areas were registered. We had tried again to enroll them into public Lebanese schools but there was no space available. For this reason, our local and international teaching volunteers provided daily education according to the Lebanese curriculum to the kids throughout this school year.

We were very grateful to welcome many of our partners and friends to the big festival concluding the school year in the premises of the camp school. The founder of the Malaak Initiative, Asma Rasamny, was there as well as the founder and director of R&R Syria, Friedrich Bokern. We also welcomed the right hand of the Mufti of Akkar, Sheikh Walid Ismaili and a prominent visitor from Germany: Ruppert Neudeck and his team of the "Green Helmets" stayed at the Peace Centre for a couple of days to explore future forms of cooperation.

But the most important of all were the kids and the local volunteers of the Al-Ihsan Team, led by Sheikh Abdou, who have produced a little miracle during this year: not one single school day had to be cancelled despite the many difficulties we had to face. We would like to thank them and our donors to have made this possible! Our volunteers and our staff members had to make some sacrifices to make this happen. In the end, we were all relieved we made it through the year.